Singing To You and Chapters

Fred Chandler has a new recording up on this site of two poems read at Beyond Baroque this winter. “Chapters” delves into the nature of human existence, carefully mapping out the quotidian texts we inscribe on the figurative walls of our lives: playground walls, schoolyard walls, backyard walls, and finally, graveyard walls. On these walls, behind the running shadows of children, we “play out stories in dreams.” These stories, however unapparent in meaning, fill our lives with acts of success and failure that can only be read upon a certain ending, “lying peacefully at rest.”

In “Singing To You”, Fred explores “another kind of music beyond the ears, the eyes, and the mind.” The music of life exists not only in sound and rhythm but in all experience, memory, and love itself. It is in the act of “dancing in sun rays and shadows” that we produce bodily music joyfully and painfully, for both weave the fabric of life.

These poems address the essential nature of writing texts, because as Joan Didion once said, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”

Press the “Play” icon to listen:

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